Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the U.S. has nothing to fear from China’s open-source AI models. “These Chinese models are excellent,” Huang told Axios’ Mike Allen on Tuesday in an exclusive interview. “Open-source models that are excellent should be used.”
This comes as Trump administration officials and U.S. research labs lobby to exclude Chinese AI models. Even Nvidia’s customers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have warned that Chinese AI systems could threaten the United States’ lead in the industry.
Huang rejected the notion that OpenAI and Anthropic should fear open-source models, arguing that they expand the market by giving more people a first experience with AI. Ultimately, he said, many users will still pay for the convenience, reliability and stronger performance offered by closed AI services.
“There’s no scenario where China runs U.S. companies off the road,” Huang said. “Zero possibility.”
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This comes following the launch of Kimi K3, an AI model by Beijing-based Moonshot. Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model designed for software engineering and autonomous task execution. While Moonshot highlighted Kimi K3’s performance across coding, reasoning and agent benchmarks, the model has also caused concerns in the U.S.
The United States also accused Moonshot of using large-scale AI distillation techniques to replicate proprietary U.S. technology as it developed its K3 model. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the U.S. government has information indicating that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable model during the development of K3.
“We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” Kratsios wrote on X.
Huang said that Wall Street and Washington have the Kimi shock exactly backward, according to Axios.
“The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek the first time,” he told Axios, adding that Wall Street has “misunderstood the impact of Kimi again this time.” He argued that cheaper, open models will bring AI to more people and businesses, increasing demand for the chips, data centers and computing power Nvidia sells.
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“Free AI should be great for hardware,” Huang said. “Free AI should be great for chips. Free AI should be great for data centers.”
Huang also said that restricting open models in the name of national security could actually leave the U.S. more vulnerable.
He said it was a “misconception” that downloaded Chinese models create a “backdoor” to Beijing, arguing that companies can customize them and control their access inside secure “sandboxes.”
Huang suggested openness makes AI more secure, not less, because outside researchers can inspect the models, expose weaknesses and build defenses.
“If everything just becomes one single model, one single point of attack, one single source of failure, I think the world is much, much more vulnerable,” he said.